I wonder how many people had their TV sets switched on yesterday morning at 5 o’clock. That’s when the CBC coverage of the royal wedding began and for the next five hours I
can only imagine that millions of viewers were glued to their screens, trying
to catch a glimpse of this or that celebrity among the six hundred who were
invited to the event.
Long before it took place, countless hours
of television time had already gone into the anticipation of the wedding—and
for the publicists it was all big money. While the costs of the wedding are
estimated to top $36 million, it was expected to generate over $860 million in
revenue. If it is anything to go by, memorabilia sales alone for the marriage
of Prince William and Kate
Middleton seven years ago amounted to more than $380
million.
By this time you may already have been
asking yourself, “What is this preacher fellow getting at—and what does all of
this business about royal weddings have to do with the Bible anyway?” Well, for
Christians today is the anniversary of another big event, when three thousand
souls were added to the fledgling group of Jesus’ followers who had come
together that morning to pray.
Little could they have imagined when they
gathered in the upper room that they would be swept off their feet (spiritually
if not physically) by a “rushing mighty wind”, touched by fire, and speaking in
languages never before heard from their lips! So completely strange was what
happened to them that it is little wonder that it all began to attract a crowd
of people who were no less amazed and perplexed than they were. “We hear them
declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”
So today, while the rest of the world is
recovering from the royal wedding or preparing for Game Five in the playoffs
between Vegas and the Jets, we Christians quietly celebrate the Feast of
Pentecost. And quite rightly our attention is fixed on the miraculous events
that occurred that morning: the mysterious whistling of the wind, the flames of
fire that divided and settled on each of the believers, and the praises of God
in all the varied languages of the known world.
It was a remarkable event—and I don’t know
how many times I have preached on it over the past forty-plus years. Yet this
year as I began my preparations, it dawned upon me that my attention has always
been focused on the events in the opening verses of Acts, chapter 2. At the
same time it began to occur to me that maybe what Luke wrote in the closing
verses of that same chapter has even more to teach us about the real meaning of
Pentecost and about the work that the Holy Spirit yearns to do in you and in
me. So allow me to read them to you.
They devoted
themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of
bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled
with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had
everything in common. They sold property
and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every
day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in
their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all
the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being
saved.
Devotion
There are three aspects of this brief
summary of the first days of the church I would like us to focus on. The first
of them can be summarized by the word “devotion”. Luke begins, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’
teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”
My Greek lexicon tells
me that those words “devoted themselves” can be translated in a whole variety
of ways: “persist in”, “attach oneself to”, “be faithful to”, “be busily
engaged in”, “hold fast to”, “persevere in”, “spend much time in”. By now
probably you get the idea. Those first believers were not prepared to allow
anything to stand in the way of learning from the apostles or from coming
together regularly for fellowship, worship and prayer.
Early in my own walk
with Christ many years ago, my pastor encouraged me to begin memorizing
Scripture. The first verses I ever committed to memory were Psalm 119:9 and 11,
and I quote them as I learned them in the old King James Version:
Wherewithal shall a
young man cleanse his way?
By taking heed thereto according to thy word…
Thy word have I hid in mine heart,
that I might not sin against thee.
By taking heed thereto according to thy word…
Thy word have I hid in mine heart,
that I might not sin against thee.
It seems to me that
those early believers did exactly what Psalm 119 counsels us to do: they were
taking God’s word to heart with an unshakeable commitment to the apostles’
teaching. Now of course they had no New Testament and they wouldn’t for a
couple of generations. But they had the apostles themselves and they spent time
learning from them, drinking in their words—and we’re not just talking about a
weekly twenty-minute sermon or even a forty-minute one. Acts 20 tells us of an
evening when the apostle Paul went on talking till midnight—to the point where
one young man drifted into sleep and fell out the window!
But the point was that
they could never hear enough. Like the two companions who met with Jesus along
the road to Emmaus on that first resurrection day, I can only imagine that
their hearts burned within them as they learned from the apostles and opened
the Scriptures together.
Some years ago we had
the privilege of hosting Ernest Gordon, who had been held captive in a Japanese
prisoner-of-war camp in Burma along what was known as the railway of death.
Although he was not a believer at the time, he and some of his men began
reading the New Testament together. It did not take long before they found that
they could not put it down, for they had the amazing experience that the same Jesus
whom they found on its pages was there among them.
Yet much of this seems
so far from the experience of the church in our part of the world today. A
recent study revealed that only forty-five percent of
those who regularly attend church read the Bible more than once a week. Almost
twenty percent say they never read the Bible—and that is about the same
percentage as those who read it on a daily basis. [1] That seems a far cry from our early forebears who lived in the
shadow of Pentecost, who could not
get enough the apostles’ teaching. Would that the Holy Spirit would stir the
same thirst in us today!
Awe
Those first believers showed a devotion to
the apostles’ teaching. But Luke also tells us in verse 43 that “everyone was
filled with awe”. Again, if you read that verse in the old King James Version,
it would sound like this: “And fear came upon every soul.” The word in the
original in fact is phobos. We find
it in words like “claustrophobia”, the fear of small spaces, “acrophobia”, the
fear of heights, and “arachnophobia”, the fear of spiders.
There was a German philosopher of a century
ago called Rudolf Otto, who came up with the phrase mysterium tremendum—the sense of something so mysterious that it
causes you to tremble. This, he said, is what happens to us when we come into
the presence of the living God.
We see it in Moses as he tended his flocks
in the wilderness and approached that strange bush that burned but was not
consumed. The book of Exodus tells us that when Moses began to realize in whose
presence he stood, “he hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:6). Or think of Isaiah in the
temple, as he gazed at the six-winged seraphs and heard their cry, “Holy, holy,
holy is the Lord God Almighty…” and felt the stone floor shuddering beneath
him. “Woe to me!” was all he could think to utter, “For I am a man of unclean
lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the
King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:3-4).
Or we can turn to the New Testament, to the
story of the centurion who came to Jesus on behalf of his servant. “Lord,” he
said to him, “I do not deserve you to come under my roof…” (Matthew 8:5-9) Think too of the occasion when Peter and his
companions had just hauled in an enormous load of fish because Jesus had told
them to let down their nets in spite of there being no fish. He fell down
before Jesus and wailed, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:1-10)
Our forebears in the faith had that same
sense of awe as they gathered to learn from the apostles, to break bread and to
pray together. The letter to Hebrews tells us,
You have come to Mount
Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to
thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in
heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous
made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a
new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the
blood of Abel. (Hebrews 12:22-24)
How we need to ask God to inspire in us
that same sense of awe—each time we gather to take time to come before him consciously
and deliberately and ask him to open our hearts afresh to the unfathomable
mystery of his love and power. I have no doubt that we would know more of the
Holy Spirit’s presence if we did.
Community
A devotion to the apostles’ teaching, awe
in the presence of the living God—and a third characteristic of those first
Christians I would like to emphasize comes in a word for which there is really
no adequate English equivalent. It is the word koinonia. Most often it is rendered “fellowship” as we see it in
this morning’s passage. But if you think of fellowship (as I suspect most of us
do) as what happens over a cup of coffee after the worship service, then we
have fallen woefully short of what the New Testament means when it uses the
word koinonia.
What it really means is having something in
common on a profound level—and Luke gives us a picture of how that works out in
practical terms in those last verses of Acts 2. Let me read them to you once
again:
All the believers were
together and had everything in common. They
sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in
the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad
and sincere hearts…
Now for us who have been immersed from
infancy in the independent-minded, freedom-loving principles western society,
that is a strange and even frightening picture. It may relieve you to know I am
not advocating that we seek to replicate detail for detail all the practices of
the early church.
What I am saying is that there was a genuine
sense of caring and sharing among those first believers that you would not have
found outside the church. I remember some years ago a pastor friend telling me
of a member of his church who was part of a small group that met for Bible
study and prayer. The man happened to work for a tobacco company. Over time he
became convinced that as a Christian he could not in good conscience continue
to do this and he shared it with the group. To his surprise, they all agreed
that if he felt that this was the direction in which God was leading him, they
would give him any financial support he might need in order to make the
change—and they ended up caring for him and his family for the better part of a
year until he found a new job.
Those people knew the meaning of the word koinonia. It was our Lord Jesus himself
who said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love
one another” (John 13:35). And so I
don’t believe it was by coincidence that Luke concludes the day of Pentecost
with these words: “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were
being saved.”
As we look back on the mighty, rushing wind
and on the tongues of fire that came upon those first believers, may we pray
not for them to happen again, but for what they led to: to a wholehearted
devotion to the apostles’ teaching, to a life-changing awe as we gather in the
presence of the living God, and to a sense of community that is costly and
real. In a word, may the Holy Spirit lead us to being the authentic body of
Jesus in the world today.
